Okay, I'm game. Let's look at some of his so-called "scientific evidence".

* "Most of the earth's crust consists of sedimentary rocks."

Apart from this not being true, as has been noted, there is, of course no reason to think that the Earth's sedimentary rocks are the result of a single, universal magic flood, rather than, for example, the processes of sedimentation which we can observe happening today.

* "How could sedimentary rock deposits come to rest near the top of Mt. Everest?"

By deposition and uplift, processes which we can observe today.

* "The existence of massive numbers of fossils worldwide is clear evidence of quick, mass burial."

No it isn't, any more then the existence of massive numbers of graves worldwide is proof that everyone died at the same time of magical causes.

* "Two paleontologists from the Museum of Natural History in Paris reported in Scientific American (September, 1988, p.70) that the evidence 'tells a contradictory story. They say this because some of the fossils are of marine (saltwater) creatures, some are definitely freshwater dwellers (e.g. amphibious), and some are definitely land creatures (e.g. spiders, scorpions, millipedes and certain insects and reptiles)."

Hmm ... I wonder if this was caused by a magic flood which covered the whole world, or by a non-magical flood which didn't?

Again, the claim that this was sudden, or that it was simultaneous, or that it involved magical supernatural processes rather than natural ones, is unsupported by any evidence or argument.

* "The random order of the fossils. The fossils within the sediments do not exhibit strong evidence of a record of evolution with simple animals at the bottom, progressing type by type up to more and more complex animals.

Unless you believe those pesky geologists.

* "The order is often random or completely upside down or out of order for evolution ... Example of random mixing of fossils. In excess of 3,000,000 fossils, representing more than 565 different species have been discovered in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California."

I'm not sure whether this is ignorance or flat-out lying, but the fact is that the La Brea Tar Pits only contain fairly recent animals, as anyone could find out with fifteen seconds with Google; there are, for example, no dinosaurs, no trilobites, no mammal-like reptiles, no pterosaurs, no Small Shelly Fauna of the Tomotian ... just lots of Pleistocene animals. In short, the tar pits show the exact opposite of what the creationist apologist claims.

Why he thinks a flood would cause thousands of animals to get trapped in a tar pit is beyond me.

* "This evidence proves that fossils do not take thousands or millions of years to form."

Of course, no-one claims that individual fossils necessarily take a long time to form, but that the entire fossil record took a long time to form.

* It is, of course, not feasible that mother just lay on the bottom of the ocean floor giving birth for thousands of years while being slowly covered up by accumulating sediments!

And, of course, scientists do not believe that a dead ichthyosaur took thousands of years to give birth, because they are not flaming idiots. If the loon who wrote this article had thought about what he was saying for five seconds, he'd have realised that scientists can't possibly believe this, and that therefore he has no idea what geologists do think about fossils.

* "Authorities on biological taxonomy estimate there are less than 18,000 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians living in the world today. This number might be doubled to 36,000 species to allow for known and possible unknown extinct land animals."

As the same authorities estimate that 99% of species are extinct, doubling the number would hardly be sufficient.

* "Allowing two of each species there would have been a total number of 72,000 animals. If you add 3,000 more animals for the 5 extra of the clean animals this would bring the total to 75,000 animals far less than the 136,560 animals that could have been taken on the Ark. This means that only 60% of the Ark would have been filled allowing plenty of room for Noah, his family, and all the provisions needed for their voyage."

Is 40% of the Ark really enough room for provisions for 75000 animals for a year?

* "if man have lived on the earth for over a million years our population should be at a minimum of 1 trillion 500 billion people."

Idiotic. The population can't grow to a trillion and a half over any period of time, because there's not enough food to support them.

* "The scientific community is lying to the world by not revealing this evidence because it contradicts their atheism."

So, there are lots of lies here. First, there's the halfwitted pretence that all scientists are atheists. Second, that they are "lying to the world". About what? If you're going to call hundreds of thousands of people liars, it would be great to quote one of them saying one thing that isn't true.

And what are they "concealing from the world"? Everything he says in his article which is actually true, came from, guess who?

Scientists.

It is scientists who say there is sedimentary rock on Everest. It was scientists who recovered the bodies from the La Brea tar pits. It was, as he admits, scientists, in a popular science magazine, who informed him of anomalous deposits at Montceau-les-Mines. Call me Mr Whimsical if you will, but if I wanted to conceal something, I wouldn't publish it in a popular magazine with a circulation in excess of half-a-million.

Or again, he writes: "In another example, there is an exquisitely preserved fossil of an extinct marine reptile called an ichthyosaur. The mother ichthyosaur is shown having almost completed giving birth to a live infant—the beak of the young reptile is still inside mother's birth canal."

Who found this out?

Scientists.

Where did they publish it?

In a science journal.

It is precisely because scientists discovered and publicized these things that he knows about them. He has, of course, never excavated a fossil himself, because that would require work. Instead, the lazy ungrateful shit sits on his arse whining about how scientists are "lying to the world" by "concealing" the very facts that they have spent years of labor revealing.

It's hard to say whether he's deliberately lying or whether he thinks that scientific knowledge magically falls out of the sky. Either way, it's crazy. All the scientific knowledge he has, he owes to scientists. And he repays them by paranoid, hateful, and libellous ravings about how they're "concealing" it from him.

* "The order is often random or completely upside down or out of order for evolution ... Example of random mixing of fossils. In excess of 3,000,000 fossils, representing more than 565 different species have been discovered in the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California."

I'm not sure whether this is ignorance or flat-out lying, but the fact is that the La Brea Tar Pits only contain fairly recent animals, as anyone could find out with fifteen seconds with Google; there are, for example, no dinosaurs, no trilobites, no mammal-like reptiles, no pterosaurs, no Small Shelly Fauna of the Tomotian ... just lots of Pleistocene animals. In short, the tar pits show the exact opposite of what the creationist apologist claims.

Why he thinks a flood would cause thousands of animals to get trapped in a tar pit is beyond me.

Especially if the tar is formed by the action of the flood (coal oil etc formation) FROM organic material (like the animals caught in the tar pits ...).

There is also evidence of different seasons in the tar pits in several alternating layers: how do you get spring\fall\spring\fall etc samples from a single catastrophe?

Why he thinks a flood would cause thousands of animals to get trapped in a tar pit is beyond me.

Ah, then you haven't heard of the oil-water flood theory. It is a corollary of the wet-dry flood theory which also includes other YEC notions such as the hot-cold, rapid-slow, turbulent-gentle, long-short, deep-shallow, turbid-clear and fresh-saline hypotheses.

It's all very simple, and everything is explained, you see...

Anyway, it's obvious that the flood included hydrocarbons, some of which were restricted to the same biomes as what we call Cenozoic creatures. Due to weathering and oxidation during a year at sea, these hydrocarbons turned into floating mats of tar. These just happened to wash up (gently in this case) at Rancho La Brea in California, so that later humans could make movies about prehistoric mammals that escaped the flood. Unfortunately, the creatures did not survive because the tar sank into the late flood sediments, creating steep-walled pits from which the creatures could not escape. This is an example of "good" design.

I don't get paid to do this. When you link a 100 point webpage and ask that I refuse ALL of it, you are asking for an immense amount of time and effort on my part.

You and I both can agree that "The Hobbit" is a work of fiction. However, if I asked you to refute EVERYTHING in the "The Hobbit" it would take you an incredible amount of time to do so.

Further, we've seen a particular line of behavior from YECs. Maybe you are different but I'll demonstrate how it goes.

-New teenage YEC shows up at EVC.-Teen YEC links "Answersingenesis" and demands that we refute the points.-We point to the thousands and thousands of posts in the EVC library which do just that.-Teen YEC doesn't bother to go read them and instead wants us to repeat ourselves.-Someone bothers to redo the work yet again.-Teen YEC vanishes without a response.-Time passes, the work becomes part of the EVC library.-New Teenage YEC shows up and the whole thing starts again.

* "Authorities on biological taxonomy estimate there are less than 18,000 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians living in the world today. This number might be doubled to 36,000 species to allow for known and possible unknown extinct land animals."

I'd love to meet these biologist and introduce them to a little thing called math.

Here's Wiki on Ants

Ants are eusocial insects of the family Formicidae and, along with the related families of wasps and bees, belong to the order Hymenoptera. They are a diverse group of more than 12,000 species,

And Beetles

Forty percent of all described insect species are beetles (about 350,000 species), and new species are frequently discovered. Estimates put the total number of species, described and undescribed, at between 5 and 8 million.

So biologists believe there could be as many as 8,000,000 species of beetles, but that there are only a total of 18,000 species alive today...

So biologists believe there could be as many as 8,000,000 species of beetles, but that there are only a total of 18,000 species alive today...

Actually, it does specify mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.

Perhaps it's assumed that the insects don't take up significant amounts of space. Your figures mean that 16,000,000 beetles are covering the decks. The practical problem that I see here is that the mammals and larger reptiles would be trampling all over them, while the birds, amphibians and smaller reptiles would be eating them.

Still, with 72,000 animals having at least one crap a day, it would be paradise for the dung beetles.

I expect Noah and his family were relieved when the waters subsided, and they could stop shovelling shit for 24 hours every day.

Okay, I seriously have to leave for camp in like 5 mins. I'll try to make this quick. Just a thing I wanted to throw out, how would plants, lichens, insects, and fungi survived this catastrophic event the flood.

Very simple. The ark had to transport only land animals, so thate mammals birds, and reptiles were essentially all that would have needed accommodations. Such as for, Noah didn't have to take sea creatures because they would not necessarily be threatened with extinction by a flood. I do see that turbulent water would cause massive carnage and destruction, as we've seen in the fossil record, and that the many oceanic, species probaly would have become extinct because of the Flood. Noah didn't need to take plants either, many could have survived as seeds, and others could have survived on floating mats of vegetation. A lot of the other insects and other invertebrates were small enough to have survived on these mats as well.

Looking at that second link (http://unmaskingevolution.com/18-flood.htm), we see them boast of "over 100 evidences in support of a global flood, rather than a local one." and actually list 114. However, upon examination we find that "reasons" 1-12 and 59-114 are purely biblical (even the ones "from logic" are based squarely on a literalist interpretation of the Bible); only "reasons" 13 through 58 are claimed to be "from science" -- "45 reasons" when they actually number 46, demonstrating that the author couldn't do simple math either. It is only those 46 "from science" that should be considered, since those are the only ones that even begin to claim to deal with actual evidence.

The next question would be what is their evidence? What sources are they quoting? What formations are they refering to? What are they talking about? If those claims are supposed to be considering the evidence, then they need to indicate what evidence it is that they are considering. That's basic scholarship and the reason for following the rules and conventions of basic scholarship (eg, citing your sources) is so that others are able to refer to those sources themselves and see for themselves what the sources say.

Needless to say, creationist writers are terrible at citing their sources. When they do cite sources, they either cite another creationist source or else another creationist was their actual source but they cite a scientific source that that other creationist had "cited" (though that other creationist undoubtedly had done the same).

For a case in point of the later case, refer to my web page which details my research into a creationist moondust claim (http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/moondust.html). I heard Dr. Morris of the ICR make the claim in a debate, but he also makes it in a footnote on page 152 of Morris' Scientific Creationism (2nd ed) in which he cites as his source a "1976" NASA document, Meteor Orbits and Dust. In reality, his source was an unpublished document written by Harold Slusher of the ICR, which was released to me as a letter written by Slusher, in which Slusher gave his source as Volume II written in 1976. When I looked up that document, I found that it was a 1967 printing of papers from a 1965 conference and that it was Volume 11 (eleven) of the series. Obviously, Morris had never seen the document that he was falsely claiming as his source (ie, he was lying) -- since just looking at the front cover would have revealed the "1976" date to be wrong -- and it is rather apparently that Slusher had also never seen that NASA document himself, but rather had gotten it from some other unnamed creationist source.

In other words, whenever anybody cites a source, look it up for yourself.

Now, when you pick one of the "from science" "evidences" (HINT: "evidences" is a fundamentalist apologetics term) from that second link, please please please pick this one:

quote:(16) An analysis of population growth statistics confirms that there was zero population at the estimated time of the end of the flood. This indicates the global demise of humans by Noah's flood.

It's also known as "The Bunny Blunder" and is the subject of one of my web pages at http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/bunny.html (which I researched by reading and referencing a number of books by Dr. Henry Morris in which he developed and presented his claim -- in short, I went straight to the source to see what the source actually said). Basically, he worked out an over-simplistic population model which appeared to get the end results he wanted, but which produces hilariously ridiculous results for the ancient past (it brought down the house in a presentation where I first heard it).

So, I do hope that you will choose to present that claim. I'm just dying to hear your explanation of some interesting historical facts that Morris' population model reveals:

quote:According to Morris' model, in 2500 BCE, the world population was 750 people, so there were only about 150 to 200 able-bodied males, all concentrated in Egypt, available to hew and haul the 2.3 million limestone blocks ranging in weight from 2 to 50 tons to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops. During the preceding 200 years, even fewer men built six neighboring pyramids and many other structures. Things were even more hectic back between 3800 BCE and 3600 BCE when the total world population of 10 - 20 people, including women and children, rushed madly back and forth between Crete and the Indus River Valley building and abandoning enough fortified cities and massive irrigation systems to have housed and fed millions. My father was right; we HAVE gotten soft!

Noah didn't have to take sea creatures because they would not necessarily be threatened with extinction by a flood.

Well, youve got yourself a bit of a problem here for a number of reasons.

1) The "flood" did cause the extinction of lots of "sea creatures" specifically the aquatic dinosaurs didn't fare so well. Why is it that the hardiest dinos couldn't make it through the flood while the wimpiest of manatees skated by?

2) Another problem is that both trout and tuna made it through the flood. But here's the thing, if you drop a trout in the ocean, it's gonna belly up. Why? Too much salt in the water. If you drop a tuna in Lake Erie, same result for opposite reason - not enough salt. So how is it that all these animals were swimming together in the same body of water?

The ark had to transport only land animals, so thate mammals birds, and reptiles were essentially all that would have needed accommodations. ... A lot of the other insects and other invertebrates were small enough to have survived on these mats as well.

Note that there are several species of birds that are so well adapted to living on the ocean that they only come to shore to breed, dealing with storms (including hurricanes?) as a normal matter of course, and thus they would easily be able to survive a year long flood with no problems at all.

Yet they needed to be protected inside the ark while land insects and other invertebrates don't need such protection when they are not so well adapted? (ever see worms on the sidewalk after a rain? they drowned).

What we see here is the beginning of the realization of the scope of the ark problem and looking for some ad hoc explanations to reduce the problem. This results in logical conflict problems like the above.

If any non-aquatic critter did not need to be in the ark, then why did any of these birds need to be there?

Considering how many of those animals need to eat fresh vegetation, he did need to take plants, possibly several million of them.

The carnivores have a diet problem as well.

All in all, at a modest average of one kilo of food per animal per week, 3,600 metric tons of food would be needed.

Then there's the problem of each member of the crew having to feed 9,000 animals, which is difficult when you're busy shovelling 9,000 animals' shit overboard.

After the first forty days, when it stopped pissing down, the fresh water problem kicks in. If they could get by with just one litre per week per animal (unlikely), that would mean a 3,600 metric ton water tank on the boat, giving us a minimum of of 7,200 tons of cargo, plus the weight of the animals, meaning the boat would've remained on the earth's surface during the duration of the flood and never floated.

"For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth."

"And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two and two of all flesh, wherein is the breath of life."

"And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man"

"And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark."